Posts tagged ‘male violence’

Article I of III: Taking into account the imprint of devastation on our collectives.

What took me to write this series on sisterhood is a situation of emergency, in which our solidarity and collective resistances are continually under threat or sabotaged by the rifts men have created in ourselves and between ourselves.[1] Men not only attack us externally but corrode us deeply from the inside so we fissure internally and then displace the violence onto ourselves and other women.[2] This way men make sure we never have the strength and cohesiveness to build a viable alternative to their necrophiliac system, so we don’t become solid enough to put their war to an end – let alone have the material capacity to do so. Although this issue is as old as men’s rule over women, the amnesia, genocide and erasure of women[3] means that the emergency seems to be as new today as it was yesterday: with much despair, I have seen collective after collective bitterly imploding, being infiltrated or taken down by those robotically defending men’s war against us.

As is often the case with misogynists and anti-feminists, the trans horde that took advantage of the “inclusivity” (read: a transwoman helped organize the march, and woe be unto anyone who crosses men who demand access to woman-only space in general) of NYC Dyke March — and others who weren’t even there — don’t seem to have read a word of anything Sheila Jeffreys has actually written. If they had read her, how could it have rationally been said that Jeffreys — a pro-female, pro-lesbian writer — and her work had no place at a lesbian-centered event?

Or, perhaps they read a couple of words, saw something they didn’t like, and threw away the rest? “The rest” being Sheila Jeffreys’s entire life’s work of pro-female, pro-lesbian, PIV-critical radical feminist analysis which spans decades and examines women’s lives from pre-WWI — a body of work from which modern women can draw many parallels, recognize obvious patterns in how women are oppressed by men over time, and call age-old bullshit when we see it, because we are never, ever allowed to see it. Women’s history is routinely erased, and this is a deliberate political strategy to keep women as ignorant of patriarchal context and as oppressed — and as complicit in our own oppression — as possible.